Receivers in digital communication systems may rely on signal timing recovery to detect the symbols in the input data signal. For example, a receiver may receive a modulated signal to recover message bits/symbols. After passband to baseband conversion, the receiver may then sample the baseband signal at a rate synchronous to the symbol rate for optimum detection of symbols. The sampling clock in the receiver, used to sample the input signal, may not be synchronized with the symbol clock.
Although the symbol rate may be known to the receiver, the sampling clock may not be commensurate with the symbol clock for various reasons, i.e., the sampling clock may be related to the symbol rate in a non-integer manner. For this reason, the receiver may not be able to generate an accurate symbol clock from the sampling clock.
Under these conditions, various symbol timing recovery techniques are sometimes used in receivers in which, the sampling clock is incommensurate with the symbol clock. The symbol timing recovery techniques, however, may rely on a separate symbol clock generator, which may be unacceptable in terms of area. In addition, such techniques may be limited in terms of performance due to relatively small drift in sampling clock frequency.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.